4. This articles is by renown research, author, and psychologist Barry McDonald. He explains how what students eat, can actually be contributing to attention issues in class. Fuel for Active Boys by Barry McDonald

Forget the term "dumb jocks." According to the latest research, that's an oxymoron. New findings from biology and education research show that regular exercise benefits the brain in numerous ways.

Not only can regular workouts in the gym or on the playground improve attention span, memory, and learning, they can also reduce stress and the effects of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and even delay cognitive decline in old age. In short, staying in shape can make you smarter.

Although researchers aren't exactly certain how exercise leads to better cognitive function, they are learning how it physically benefits the brain. For starters, aerobic exercise pumps more blood throughout the body, including to the brain. More blood means more oxygen and, therefore, better-nourished brain tissue.

Exercise also spurs the brain to produce more of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which Ratey calls "Miracle-Gro for the brain." This powerful protein encourages brain cells to grow, interconnect, and communicate in new ways. Studies also suggest exercise plays a big part in the production of new brain cells, particularly in the dentate gyrus, a part of the brain heavily involved in learning and memory skills.

It wasn't until recently that researchers turned their interest to children -- in whom exercise may have more impact. The brain's frontal lobe, thought to play a role in cognitive control, keeps growing throughout the school years, says Charles Hillman, associate professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Illinois. "Therefore, exercise could help ramp up the development of a child's brain," he says.

In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, Hillman put 259 Illinois third graders and fifth graders through standard physical education routines such as push-­ups and a timed run, and he measured their body mass. Then he checked their physical results against their math and reading scores on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test.

"There was a relationship to academic performance," says Hillman. "The more physical tests they passed, th­e better they scored on the achievement test." The ef­fects appeared regard­less of gender and socioeconomic differences, so it seems that regardless of his or her race or family income, the fitness of a child's body and mind are tightly linked.

The bigger the dose of exercise, the more it can pay off in academic achievement. In a study published the same year in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, researchers found that children ages 7-11 who exercised for 40 minutes daily after school had greater academic improvement than same-aged kids who worked out for just 20 minutes.

Phillip Tomporowski, professor of exercise science at the University of Georgia, and one of the team members who conducted the study, says much of the research today seems to negate the old notion that recess sends kids back to class more hyper and rowdy. "It appears to be the other way around," he says. "They go back to class less boisterous, more attentive, and better behaved compared with kids who have been sitting in chairs for hours on end."

Hillman also tested that notion in a study published this year in Neuroscience and found that kids had more accurate responses on standardized tests when they were tested after moderate exercise, as opposed to being tested after 20 minutes of sitting still. His results lend support to the idea that just a single aerobic workout before class helps boost kids' learning skills and attention spans.

2. The Vestibular System and the Brain. http://www.brainbreakthrough.com/vestibular.html The vestibular system influences motor control and motor planning that are necessary to use the fine muscles in the throat, tongue, lips, and jaw to produce intelligible speech. Because the vestibular system is crucial for effective auditory processing, the child with vestibular dysfunction frequently develops problems with language. In addition, other input mechanisms that affect and are affected by the vestibular functioning are the hip and leg joints impacting large motor coordination, hands and fingers affecting fine motor skills, and the pressors on the soles of the feet giving a sense of stability and balance and space.

It's important to realize that the vestibular, auditory and visual systems work together as they process sensations of movement and sound and light. These sensations are closely intertwined, as they all begin to be processed and/or influenced by receptors of the ear. Vision is an important component of the vestibular system. About twenty percent of visual neurons respond to vestibular stimulation (e.g. when spinning, head shaking, or rocking). The auditory system is also highly involved in vestibular functions. The vestibular and auditory nerves join in the auditory canal and become the eighth cranial nerve of the brain. Anything that disrupts auditory information can also affect vestibular functioning.

One system feeds the other information that allows us to think, move, comprehend and interpret the world around us. We call this process of balancing and improving the communication between the input systems, sensory integration.

The other area of sleep research relevant to teenagers, their parents, and teachers is the effect of sleep on learning and memory. In experiments done at Harvard Medical School and Trent University in Canada, students go through a battery of tests and then sleep various lengths of time to determine how sleep affects learning. What these tests show is that the brain consolidates and practices what is learned during the day after the students (or adults, for that matter) go to sleep. Parents always intuitively knew that sleep helped learning, but few knew that learning actually continues to take place while a person is asleep. That means sleep aftera lesson is learned is as important as getting a good night's rest before a test or exam.

This research is done by giving students a series of tests. The students are trained, for instance, to catch a ball attached by a string to a cone-like cup. As they repeat the skill during the test day, they are able do it faster and more accurately. Let's say they go from catching a ball 50 percent to 70 percent of the time over a period of half an hour. The students who get a good night's sleep improve when they are retested. On a retest three days after they have a good night's sleep, they might catch a ball 85 percent of the time. The other students who got less than six hours sleep either do not improve or actually fall behind.

Some of the tests are more demanding. They are called cognitive procedural tasks and they mimic what a student might learn in physics or math, or in certain sports. They present the student with something new to be learned or require an ability to conceptualize, to form a picture of the task in their minds.

The brain consolidates learning during two particular phases of sleep. According to Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard University Medical School, who conducted a series of tests involving visual tasks, the brain seems to need lots of slow-wave sleep and a good chunk of another kind of sleep, Rapid Eye Movement, or REM. Dr. Stickgold hypothesizes that the reason the brain needs these particular kinds of sleep is that certain brain chemicals plummet during the first part of the night, and information flows out of the hippocampus (the memory region) and into the cortex. He thinks the brain then distributes the new information into appropriate networks and categories. Inside the brain, proteins strengthen the connections between nerve cells consolidating the new skills learned the day before. Then later, during REM, the brain re-enacts the lessons from the previous day and solidifies the newly-made connections through the memory banks.

What these studies show is that learning a new task, whether it is sports or music, will be greatly helped by getting a good night's sleep and that students' ability to remember things, be it a lesson on geometry or the causes of the Second World War, is mediated by sleep.

The proposition that sleep aids the learning process is accepted by many researchers. In a review of the Harvard studies, the late Chris Gilpin described the research as "the most believable data ever collected that a specific memory function is associated with sleep." However, a recent study published in the November 2001 issue of the journal Sciencechallenges that conclusion. After conducting a literature review, Jerome M. Siegel of the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Brain Research and the Center for Sleep Research, judged the evidence of a link between REM sleep and learning to be "weak and contradictory." He pointed to inconsistent results from human and animal studies, and argued that studies of humans who do not experience REM sleep (due to brain injuries or pharmacological reasons) do not show memory problems. Siegel concludes, however, that although he does not believe that the existing literature points to a link between REM sleep and memory consolidation, "just as nutritional status, ambient temperature, level of stress, blood oxygenation, and other variables clearly affect the ability to learn, adequate sleep is vital for optimal performance in learning tasks."